I’ve been playing MIDI guitar for as long as I can remember. I’ve known every generation of hexaphonic pickups, plus other much stranger solutions that weren’t really guitars at all. I’ve been at this since the eighties. I think this software is an incredible piece of work by its author, and it’s been on the market for years, but there’s something important it has never been able to solve, and maybe never will. I don’t know what kind of musicians use it, but minor seconds clearly aren’t part of their vocabulary, let alone voicings that contain them: close-voiced Maj7 chords, minor 9 chords, and so many other possibilities are all left out because the software couldn’t, can’t, and won’t be able to handle them. Which brings me to the question: is software that leaves all of that out really finished? Is it fair to keep claiming, as the author has for so many years, that the software is finished, when there’s such a glaring limitation that restricts the palette and vocabulary of a modern musician?
You should give MIDI Guitar 3 Hex a spin. It does require a hex pickup and a 6 channel input interface, but solves this issue as it is basically 6 independent streams and doesn’t have the problem of trying to figure out those close of intervals. With Hex, it will pretty much play any chord you can reach on the guitar. It would be awesome if standard MG3 can get there at some point, but it definitely achievable today with the hex version.
Thanks for the feedback.
The standard tracker struggles with minor second intervals. The laws of physics makes responsive tracking and high resolution at odds. To catch more crowded notes, it would have to be slower. The standard MG tracker is the result of many years of evolution and feedback from its users, full of tradeoffs and compromises that works reasonably well for most people and playing styles. Polyphonic tracking from a single jack will never be perfect, because even when we find some headroom, we will typically use that to decrease latency and responsiveness, because that’s something everybody appreciates.
For best tracking, and strumming jazzy chords, you want to use hex pickups and MG HEX, which is a totally different game.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. The physics makes sense, and I understand the tradeoff between latency and resolution.
My point is less about the tracker itself and more about how it’s presented. Minor seconds and close voicings are basic vocabulary for many players, especially in jazz and contemporary music. If the single jack version can’t handle them, I think that should be stated clearly upfront, so players know from the start that MG HEX is the way to go for that kind of playing.
I’ve been using hex pickups since the eighties, so I’ll look into MG HEX.
Having been through virtually all the existing systems on the quest for robust pitch-to-MIDI performance, struggling with poor response from some hardware systems and problematic interval interpretation in software tools, I can add validation to the two previous comments: you really must investigate MG3 Hex. There’s nothing else quite like it!
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Detect individual strings on a standard guitar without a HEX pickup